


Compromised

by sepia_senta



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Multi, Slow Burn, Spoilers through 2x18, Takes Place Somewhere in Season 2 and Diverges Wildly From There
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-05
Updated: 2015-11-30
Packaged: 2018-04-25 00:44:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 15,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4940194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sepia_senta/pseuds/sepia_senta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a foregone conclusion in their line of work that one of them would die, sooner or later. That's what contingencies are for. But when the time comes that John might not make it home, Harold does the unthinkable to save him. Then come the consequences.</p>
<p>Chapter 1: The call came at close to midnight. It was late October and Harold was perched at his desk, manning a series of surveillance feeds. On his monitors, violence unfolded wholesale. There was nothing he could do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> First POI fic. No beta as I'm entirely new to this fandom, yikes. This show is terrible crack.

They lost so few.

As the weeks dissolved into months dissolved into years, this truth stood out to Harold like a glimmer of gold at the bottom of a prospector’s pan. The work he and Mr. Reese did was dangerous, a lethal threat wound intimately through the threads of each case, each Number they unraveled.

Despite that, so few of them died.

Their success boiled down to a few factors. Superior resources and intelligence, for one. Also Mr. Reese’s efficient field work. Most of their potential victims escaped unscathed. Many never even knew they’d almost been victims. And most potential aggressors saw their plans thwarted. Sometimes they never even knew how or by whom.

Were Harold a different man, he might have grown complacent. He might have been taken by surprise when things went wrong to the point of having no contingency. He might have been given to flights of panic in the event a mission did not go according to plan.

But Harold was not that hypothetical man. And there was always a contingency.

In the event they couldn’t defuse the situation, couldn’t slip their hands in and clip the wires before the bomb blew, the priorities were simple.

Like all systems Harold devised, it all broke down to simple if-then statements in the end.

If their Number was violent and succeeded at murdering their target, their priority became justice.

If their Number was a victim and they couldn’t intervene in time, their priority became protecting any innocents nearby. Then fall back to #1.

If due to circumstance neither of those was an option, all that remained was ensuring the safety of their operation.

From where Harold sat, that final objective almost always translated into _get John out alive._

There were so many fall-backs and they lost so few Numbers that times when the final objective became the singular objective were few and far between. And each time, Harold hoped it might get easier. Hoped the awful clenching tightness of his throat might ease up, hoped that breathing might come easier.

It never did.

If anything it grew worse.

###

The call came at close to midnight. It was late October and Harold was perched at his desk, manning a series of surveillance feeds. On his monitors, violence unfolded wholesale. There was nothing he could do.

Sixteen neatly-segmented boxes filled the screens. The scenery in each box was similar but not identical, like pieces of a sliding puzzle that might make up a whole image if manipulated just right.

Each box showed a slice of similar-looking hallways and narrow rooms, all white and grey. Painted steel, exposed pipes along the ceiling. The cramped, efficient lines of a ship’s interior.

If an observer didn’t look too close, the scene aboard the _Esperanza_ didn’t look so bad. Only occasionally did the feeds flicker and rotate to the bad angles, the hidden-away nooks and corners of the vessel where the sterile walls were slashed with red and the hallways were puddled with blood.

One feed blinked into a hallway where a young man curled against himself on the floor. He clutched his abdomen, knees up in the fetal position, but that did nothing to stem the flow of blood. Harold watched without blinking, rapt with horror at how fast things had gone _so_ wrong.

“Mr. Reese, talk to me.” His voice came out more even than his heart rate felt. “Ever since Kovačić went down, I can’t _hear_ anything.”

Borna Kovačić was the scrap metal hauler responsible for this whole mess. In Harold’s eyes he was the worst combination a criminal could be: just ambitious enough to poorly plan terrible things; not smart enough to keep his operation from falling down around his ankles.

A week prior, Reese had managed to bug Kovačić’s phone. A few minutes ago, gunfire had exploded along the comms link before the bug went abruptly dead.

Reese replied, just a hint out of breath:

“I’m trying to figure out how the shooting started. No sign of Gadzic.”

Mark Gadzic: petty criminal, history of breaking and entering, sometimes stripped foreclosed properties of their copper at his boss’ request. When he’d found out Kovačić planned to escalate his budding criminal enterprise from fencing scrap to trafficking girls, he’d tipped off the authorities.

Which was when the Machine had spat his social security number out.

“He knows the ship well, he may be trying to avoid the cameras if he thinks Kovačić’s men are watching.” Harold pushed his glasses up further onto the bridge of his nose, a nervous habit. “He’s either ditched or destroyed his phone. You need to make contact. He has to know he can trust you.”

Easier said than done, of course. The freighter wasn’t exactly diminutive and the interior was both a labyrinth and a monument to efficient use of square footage.

Either Gadzic had thrown himself into the frigid Hudson or he was still down there somewhere. Harold would stake his fortune on the latter.

Movement caught his eye.

One camera’s view lit up with gunfire and rushing figures. Harold double-checked Reese’s position, then directed him toward one of the cargo holds.

“They’re two levels below you,” he said.

From his near-omniscient perspective, he caught glimpses of Reese making his way through the corridors. His prowl of the ship was characteristically careful, but his care was directed toward lines of sight and firing angles, not shielding himself from Harold’s watchful eye.

Commotion clamored down their phone connection. He pulled up the camera closest to Reese’s last spotted location and was rewarded with the last few seconds of a shoving match. A man in a black turtleneck and an Army surplus coat threw a few punches at Reese, who sidestepped them with ease. He then caught the man in one of those complicated-looking Akido grapples and slammed him against the hallway’s steel wall.

Harold couldn’t hear the interrogation, but he’d heard enough like it to get the idea.

Seconds later, Reese chimed in:

“This guy says it’s chaos down there. Kovačić called a meeting, said he knew about the tip. Blamed some guy named Bodily, who took offense. He started shooting and everybody else joined in.”

The waste of life struck Harold as senseless and regretful. Even if the entire operation consisted of mixed-bag criminals, Gadzic’s actions had proved at least one of them was a decent man somewhere deep down.

Harold made an executive decision.

“Mr. Reese,” he said. “At this point there isn’t much we can do. Find Mr. Gadzic and get out of there. The authorities are already waiting at the Port of Albany.”

After taking such heavy losses to his crew, it was unlikely Kovačić could attempt to bypass the team of police, customs, and Coast Guard officials waiting. Or whoever was steering the freighter, presuming Kovačić could be among the dead. Their best hope was to evacuate Gadzic to ensure he was safe to testify. The rest of them, well…

Senseless. Wasteful. But ultimately outside the scope of their abilities.

His fingers flew along the keyboard though of their own accord, dropping certain cameras and picking up the feeds from others so that he could best follow Reese’s progress through the ship. Harold knew how his partner had first felt about his tendency to follow him like that, but somewhere along the line, Reese’s irritation had petered out into grudging acceptance. And sometimes it seemed to border on appreciation.

He watched his partner creep through each successive deck, climbing further into the bowels of the ship. The way Reese moved was unlike the others on board the _Esperanza._ He telegraphed confidence with every step. When caution did slow him, it was only when he was assessing his next move.

Reese ducked around a corner, out of camera view, and when Harold found him next, he was crouching over a body.

“Bad news, Finch.” He glanced up in the vague direction of the hallway camera. He had a hand on the corpse’s neck. The face was turned away from Harold’s view, but Reese’s tone of voice said it all.

“I found Gadzic,” he said, unnecessary.

Harold pinched the bridge of his nose, screwing his eyes shut. Reese had once referred to one of their worst-botched Numbers as a _full blown cluster event_ and this one was approaching the same status at a rapid pace.

A single shot rang in Harold’s ear. On the monitor, Reese lowered his pistol. A few cameras over, a man in a balaclava slumped to the ground.

“It looks to me like you’ve got two options, Mr. Reese: hide out until they dock or liberate a lifeboat.”

“I don’t fancy my chances with police, Coast Guard, _and_ customs combing over this thing at once.”

“Lifeboats are one deck up and to the aft, then.” Harold double-checked the _Esperanza’s_ schematics just to be sure.

“Thanks, Finch.”

Which meant he’d be heading out into the dreadful, sleety rain to go collect his operative sooner than anticipated. Harold cast a glance toward the exit, which drew an inquisitive whuff from Bear in his doggy bed.

“Not just yet, Bear.”

Then it happened.

The explosion sounded strange over their comm link. More like a distant concussive _whump_ than the thunderous detonation it must have been in reality. Carried through several decks of sound-absorbing steel, the noise itself had an oddly muted, wavering quality. What Harold heard most prominently was the twisting and rending of the _Esperanza’s_ frame rather than the actual blast.

He might not have guessed it was an explosion at all were it not for the horrible, spreading fire that raced across all sixteen of his vantage points at once, each camera winking out of existence as the flames passed. _It appears to have originated in the boiler room,_ he thought on auto-pilot. Then a half-second later: _oh, John’s still on board._

And he was in the dark.

###

Reese wasn’t answering and the cameras had gone dead.

Harold reviewed the last few seconds of footage at a frantic pace.

Reese had stepped into the aft stairwell, bound for the lifeboats, and then all hell had broken loose. They didn’t even know how many men were left alive on board the _Esperanza_ , let alone who’d blown it up and what threat they might be.

Logic told him that Reese had been far enough away from the boiler room that the explosion itself couldn’t have killed him. Probably not even hurt him. Freighters were sturdy things by design. But that silence, that horrible silence. Harold had an imaginative mind and it worked against him in moments like these.

Leaning hawkishly over his keyboard, he brought up the freighter’s position via GPS and pushed the data packet to his phone. Bear pricked his ears up, silent in his awareness of his owner’s rising anxiety. Harold didn’t have time to comfort him.

He knew Reese would be all right, but all the same, when the link finally reactivated, he released a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.

The call was coming from Reese’s handset.

“Finch,” the voice on the other end sounded dizzy, dazed. “Someone just bombed her, didn’t they?”

A pause.

“Wait, don’t say anything. Don’t bother. Ears are ringing. Can’t hear. Banged my head, lost the earpiece.”

A grunt of effort. Something clattering and banging in the background.

“The door out onto main deck is wedged shut. Might be damaged or some security feature. I need another way out.”

Harold was pulling up the freighter’s blueprints before Reese even made the request. His mouth drew into a thin, tight line at what he saw. Cargo bays took up much of the space in the boat’s center of mass. All crew passages ringed the outside in a perimeter from the third deck down.

 _He’s going to have to go back down in there._ The knowledge hit Harold like a punch to the stomach. He had no cameras to back up his hypothesis, but all signs pointed to the lower decks being an unsafe place.

 _Down to third level, past the mess, access ladder._ He texted the instructions with a clenched jaw. _Or just try to get that bulkhead open._

Seconds passed.

“I’ll try to get it open, Finch.” Something in Reese’s voice was off. He spoke too slow, too ponderous. Myriad worst case scenarios raced through Harold’s mind. Was he concussed?

Unable to wait any longer, Harold pushed all data on the _Esperanza_ mission to his laptop, slammed it shut, and grabbed his coat. He stalked out of the library, Bear following at his heels. He paused at the gate only to soothe the dog back into a sitting position.

“Bear, _ga zitten._ ” He put a hand against the Malinois’ brow, gave him a single scratch behind the ears. “I’ve got to go get him.”

###

The drive was among the longest of Harold’s life.

###

Their mobile command center, a grey van that wouldn’t be so out of place in a naval yard, was no substitute for the real thing. Harold parked it as close as he could to the Hudson’s banks.

Sheets of slushy, half-freezing rain pelted the van from all sides, dimming the yard’s lights. He could see glimmering windows out on the water’s surface but it was difficult to tell what was a boat and what was merely buildings on the opposite bank.

Until he caught sight of a strangely-listing mass, a dark outline in the rain like a black hole in the middle of the Hudson. The _Esperanza_ was going down.

Harold clawed the handset to his mouth, their call still active although neither man had spoken for a while.

“John,” he started. “Please tell me you’re out of there.” The words came out in such a rush that he’d said them before his brain had a chance to remind him. If Reese was close enough to the blast, the damage to his hearing could last for _days,_ not minutes.

He texted instead, though a more restrained version: _You out?_

An indistinct shuffling sounded over his phone’s tinny speaker. Someone groaned.

“Harold?”

“John—” he started again, startled by the disoriented weakness he heard in Reese’s voice. Again, he reminded himself: _he can’t hear you._

 _You okay?_ he asked via SMS.

Seconds later, Reese mumbled:

“I think… I fell asleep.”

Panic clutched at Harold’s heart with icy talons. He balled a fist, put the hand to his mouth. This would be so much easier if Reese could _hear_ him. It was now screamingly obvious that he’d suffered some sort of head injury. Getting him onto a lifeboat was supposed to be the easiest part of this entire operation. But now?

He breathed in deep. Fussing wasn’t going to help anyone. He’d go out into the rain himself if he had to.

That was a knowledge that came to Harold with a settled, bone-deep certainty. There was no moment of deliberation. There was no question of calling Carter or Fusco or anyone else. Just a simple acknowledgment of an obvious fact: he would do it.

Clambering stiff and stilted into the back of the van, he peered out the one-way window toward the eerie gap in the lights where he knew the _Esperanza_ waited. There had to have been witnesses. The yard could evolve from being sleepy and deserted to a media circus in a matter of minutes as soon as someone realized what had happened.

On the other end of the phone line, Reese shuffled around. Footsteps, slow at first, then more evenly paced. Reese coughed. Harold absorbed these sounds with a strange mixture of relief and concern. He did not like the sound of Reese’s voice. But at the same time, each clatter and cough meant that he was alive and moving toward the exit.

 _Talk to me,_ he texted. _Cameras nonfunctional, but I can still assist you._

He flipped open his laptop, crouching over it. Pain raced down his neck, sudden as a stab wound. He ground his teeth and blocked it out.

“Everything that can burn down here is on fire,” Reese said. “There was a shooting in the mess, looks like.”

Harold squinted at the schematic on his screen.

 _10 meters past mess on your left, almost there_ he texted.

He found himself wanting to speak to Reese, to reassure him. Even though his field op was the last person on planet earth who’d ever need it. It was a compulsion, Harold supposed. One he could revisit at a later date.

_Up the ladder, out bulkhead to main deck, lifeboats there._

Somewhere in the depths of the _Esperanza,_ Reese coughed, the sound of it rough and raw.

“It’s getting hard to see,” he croaked. The cool, observant calm of his voice was still there in the background. He didn’t sound worried. Just a little soft around the edges. But that in and of itself was worrying.

 _Feel your way along the wall if you have to,_ Harold texted. He was certain Reese knew that, but Harold had to say something. Depending on how severe his head trauma was, it was possible obvious solutions might not occur to him.

Reese coughed again, hissed in pain. Then came the creaky metal sound of hinges opening.

He’d found the hatch. That had to be it.

“Almost there,” Harold murmured.

Reese’s breathing was heavier with exertion. Harold tensed himself for the injuries he might be confronted with. He ran through the mental list of medical staff accessible to them, codes programmed into his phone that could summon a surgeon at a moment’s notice.

 _This is why I watch you on the cameras, John,_ he thought. It was so much less excruciating when he could see. When he had some visual confirmation— _any_ visual confirmation—that things weren’t as bad as he feared.

Finally, Reese rasped: “I made it.”

Harold sat unmoving. His breath was fogging up the window.

“Heading out the bulkhead and onto the deck,” Reese murmured. Then he growled with exertion.

“Not far now,” Harold coaxed, encouraging.

He almost missed the slight, surprised intake of breath.

“Finch,” Reese said, his voice high and tight with surprise. “There’s someone—”

A gunshot cut him off.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “If you’re about to tell me to turn around and leave you, don’t bother,” Harold hissed out loud. He was mildly glad Reese hadn’t heard that bit. Instead, he texted: Too late, already en route.  
> “They’re scared. Firing at anything that moves.”  
> I’ll deal with it, Harold replied. He wasn’t sure how.  
> Shallow breath came down the connection. He wondered why Reese had gone quiet. Had he lost consciousness?  
> “Finch,” he finally said. “There’s something you should know.”  
> “If this is some dramatic deathbed confession, save it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Busily chugging away at editing the rest of this. Thank you kindly to everyone who has read and commented. :)
> 
> Sorry for any formatting errors, I am posting this from my phone!

“John?”

Harold gave up all pretense of formality, of code names, of protocol. “John, please.”

He felt like a house of cards. Like a grand construction that appeared solid from a distance, threatening to crumble under the slightest touch.

It had been two minutes since the gunshot. Reese hadn’t made a sound.

But the call was still active. Whoever shot him hadn’t bothered with his phone. And indeed, someone had shot him. Because if it was the other way around, he would have _said something_.

Harold clambered around the rear of the van, readying himself. He shed his suit jacket and donned a rain slicker, zipped it up to his neck. He pulled on gloves and checked his phone’s charge and readied himself for the job ahead like a soldier going off to war.

“John, stay where you are,” he said, because he needed to speak aloud to keep from going crazy, “I’ll meet you there. If you’re hurt, don’t try to move.”

Then for good measure, he texted: _On my way. Don’t move._

The rain and wind hit Harold like a sheet of solid ice, forceful and freezing. He had yet to devise a plan that would successfully get him onto the slanting deck of the _Esperanza_ , but that was one aspect of himself that he knew better than to doubt. Many mistook his nervous disposition for a lack of confidence, but he trusted himself innately when it came to solving problems.

He _would_ figure out a way and he _would_ get there. These were things that were beyond question.

The pelting rain drowned out all other ambient noise in the dockyard, which was both a blessing and a curse. Given the weather it was doubtful anyone would see or hear him. But it also masked anything that might come through his earpiece.

Harold grabbed an axe from the back of the van and rolled the door shut. _Desperate times,_ he thought. Before stepping out into the rainy yard for good, he shot off a cursory text to Detective Carter. Just their location and to keep an eye on the police bands, were she working the late shift. She often was.

He didn’t ask for help and rationalized this with the truth that she was at least a fifty minute drive away. Other reasons were neatly filed in the back of his mind to be dealt with at a later time.

Anything that did not involve getting John Reese off that boat was not a priority.

Lurching through the rain, Harold made way for the smaller, private piers. He didn’t have the equipment or the time to commandeer a commercial boat. Something smaller with a lower profile, that was what he needed. He’d figure out what to do on the _Esperanza_ once he got there.

When he first stepped onto the pier, he stumbled. Just a slip of unsuitable shoes on slick wood. He caught himself reflexively, but the move sent a twinge of pain up his sciatic nerve that was downright cruel.

Pain, too, could wait.

He shelved even his worry, hurrying down the pier and checking the boats he passed. Most were midmarket yachts, and though they were fitted with capable motors, their masts and rigging would just get in the way. He needed something low and quick. Something nobody would see.

When he reached the end of the pier, he was no closer to his goal. A forlorn dinghy loitered down a flight of steps, but he couldn’t spot an outboard. Harold was a lot of things, especially when he set his mind on something, but he was not in good enough shape to row over to the freighter, haul Reese out, and row them off to safety.

He stalked back toward the yard, intent on trying the next pier over. _You’re wasting time,_ he told himself. _There has to be an easier solution. Simplify._

Setting his jaw, he raked his eyes over the bobbing shapes of night-dark yachts that flanked him.

_Find an expensive one_. Just like the _Esperanza,_ it would have a lifeboat. A small, quick, unobtrusive lifeboat.

He sought out the largest yacht and clambered over.

Sailboats were made for able-bodied men. He hadn’t the strength nor the presence of mind to drag a ramp over, but there were a few boarding planks haphazardly scattered around. Slippery, soft wooden boarding planks. Harold hauled one into place and managed to cross over onto the yacht in an undignified scurry.

He was going to hurt in the morning.

Once his shoes were firm upon the deck, he made way for the cabin. There would be emergency supplies _somewhere_ on board. First aid kit, flare gun, radio, life raft. All of these things would come in handy.

The cabin door was locked. Without hesitation, Harold slammed the butt of his axe into the window, then reached in to unlock it from the inside. Glass crunching under his shoes, he shut the door and began his search.

Too many minutes had passed. When he peered out a porthole, he could see the _Esperanza_ listing hard to starboard, a good half of it now underwater. And—was that a crowd of people gathering on the opposite shore? He saw lights, more lights than there had been. But they were too far off and the rain was too thick for anything to be certain.

A muffled noise sounded in his earpiece. His stomach clenched.

Remembering, he pulled out his phone to text: _Report?_

It seemed like the wrong word to use. Asking for a check-in like an uptight boss or anxious parent. It conveyed nothing of the enormity of his worry. But worry could wait.

Though it was doubtless the wrong thing to do, Harold paused in his searching and stood, a hand cupped around his ear. He needed to hear Reese’s voice. Though he knew without any question that even if his partner were dead, he would still venture out there. Not to recover the body or anything so maudlin, but because he couldn’t bear the idea of Reese being discovered amongst the wreckage of human traffickers.

Whatever man he’d been in the past, he had earned a better legacy than that.

But none of that mattered, because he had a cautious belief that Reese was alive and kicking. If anyone could take a bullet on a sinking ship in the middle of a storm and walk out the other end…

So when Reese finally spoke, Harold didn’t feel _surprise_ so much as just a great, flooding relief.

“Hey, Finch…” His voice was rough, strained. “It’s not looking good.”

“You always were one for understatement,” Harold murmured.

He texted: _I see the ship. Coming for you. Still on main deck aft?_

The rain and dark made it impossible to tell which end of the _Esperanza_ was the one underwater.

“Yeah,” Reese said. “I can’t…” He laughed, a short breathless sound. “I can’t really move.”

Harold swallowed the growing lump in his throat and resumed his pacing through the cabin’s interior. He found a flare gun and a set of keys tucked behind the wheel, then descended below. All his years of rooting through other people’s possessions had gifted him an innate knack for seeking out hiding places, places of safekeeping. A meticulous upper-middle-class New Yorker wealthy enough to buy a yacht this size had a different mentality to a rich playboy who would likely own a much larger craft and tether it somewhere more private.

The rich relied on others for their security. The middle class took a more proactive and direct approach. The life raft would be somewhere secure, because someone who owned a boat like this would care for it, would be concerned at the prospect of theft and—

He was thinking himself in circles as a distraction, he knew.

_How bad?_ He texted Reese, though he wasn’t certain he wanted to know.

“Not sure,” Reese breathed after a short hesitation. “Point blank, lower abdomen. He shoved the barrel under my vest.”

Harold had heard that tone of voice before. That deadpan calm. So matter-of-fact, so expository. Reese never spoke of injuries to his own person with a sense of frustration or dread. The worse things got, the more urbane he sounded. Harold had to keep him talking.

When he glanced at his phone, he couldn’t believe it. Less than an hour had passed since the explosion. It felt like a thousand years. He began composing an encouraging message, but Reese interrupted him.

“You said you’re here already.” He paused, but not long enough to wait for a confirmation. “Kovačić’s men haven’t left yet. At least not all. I can.” He breathed in, sharp. “Hear them.”

“If you’re about to tell me to turn around and leave you, don’t bother,” Harold hissed out loud. He was mildly glad Reese hadn’t heard that bit. Instead, he texted: _Too late, already en route._

“They’re scared. Firing at anything that moves.”

_I’ll deal with it,_ Harold replied. He wasn’t sure how.

Shallow breath came down the connection. He wondered why Reese had gone quiet. Had he lost consciousness?

“Finch,” he finally said. “There’s something you should know.”

“If this is some dramatic deathbed confession, _save it,_ ” Harold snapped. He unlocked a door and let himself back out onto the deck, making his way toward the yacht’s stern. Raindrops on hardwood rattled noisily in his ears. He hoped he didn’t miss anything important.

“Even if you get here in time, I won’t be of much help.” Reese said it with a curt finality that made Harold’s stomach churn. Something in the sound of his voice caused a stir of violent nausea. A note of subtle, slinking terror that he’d never heard before.

_Why?_ he asked by text.

Reese laughed, short and awkward, like he was embarrassed by what he was about to say.

“It’s…” He trailed off, started again. “I can’t move my legs. Or even feel them.”

###

The life raft was a small Zodiac tethered to the stern of the yacht with a heavy chain. And guarding that chain was a heavy padlock. Harold stooped in the rain, his back and neck afire, and began rotating through keys one by one. He worked in a methodical, careful way. Easier to just try the keys in order than try to guess by shape and size. That way he wouldn’t miss one. He wouldn’t cherry-pick. It would be quicker. It would be—

—better than thinking about Reese bleeding out on the freighter’s deck, paralyzed. His spinal cord possibly severed. His new life possibly done. The cruelty of an independent mind robbed of its body’s ability.

He could not think these things.

“Finch?” He barely heard Reese’s voice over the rain. His hands were too busy to text a reply. But he listened, he listened with all his heart.

What Reese said next didn’t make any sense.

“Owen Island,” he said. Then nothing.

A small brassy key slid home into the padlock. Harold wrenched it from the chain with force, then shook the heavy links free of the Zodiac’s tether. If the outboard wasn’t gassed up, he would find out who owned this boat and _ruin their lives,_ leave them penniless and broken.

There was a storage box at the stern that caught his eye, secured with a similar padlock. Harold tried the same key. It worked. Inside: two inflatable rafts, four life jackets, a first aid kit, and some fishing equipment. Harold threw everything but the fishing kit and the child-sized life vests into the Zodiac, the effort leaving him out of breath.

Then he texted Reese, just to keep him talking. _I remember Owen Island, why?_

He preferred not to think about Owen Island overmuch. How he’d felt pinned under the barrel of that serial killer’s gun. How Alan Fahey’s eyes had looked a little too deep into his own, seen a little too much. Harold had seen brilliance there, a broken brilliance that wasn’t unfamiliar. He’d seen the same shine in Reese’s eyes when they’d first met. That similarity bothered him.

“Carter,” Reese mumbled. “She saved you. Shot that guy.”

Harold had to jump down into the Zodiac, splashing frigid water in all directions. His hands were near numb with the cold. By his calculations, he had about another hour or two before he risked hypothermia. And Reese had been out in the rain even longer.

“If she hadn’t been there…”

Harold pulled the cord. The outboard sputtered and choked. He pulled back again and still the motor struggled. Something inside him snapped. He slammed his fist against the powerhead and let out an ungainly howl of frustration. He was so close.

_Doesn’t matter, because she was,_ he texted, the capacitive fingertips of his gloves sliding wetly on the touchscreen. And it had been Beecher who’d fired the final shot. Entirely beside the point.

“Yeah,” Reese said. “She was.”

Then a moment later:

“I didn’t get there in time.” That short, cut-back horror was present in Reese’s voice again. “Just like Jessie. I didn’t make it.”

“Stop it, John. You’re delirious. I need you sharp,” Harold said, more for his own benefit than Reese’s.

“It bothered me. I owe you so much. I’m…” On the deck of the sinking freighter, Reese breathed in through his teeth, the sound a thin hiss in Harold’s ear. “I’m real sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Harold was shouting now. “It’s the past! I don’t know if you can hear me, but it’s the past, John, and once we’ve lived through it, we get the luxury of _never having to worry about it again._ ”

“Thank you for everything,” Reese said. He was slurring his words now, be it blood loss or cold, Harold had no idea. “I didn’t deserve a second chance. You gave me one anyway.”

“Everyone deserves a second chance,” Harold said. He pulled the cord one last time. “Yours isn’t over yet.”

The motor fired to life. Harold could have cried. He pulled his hood up and squinted toward the dark, ominous mass of the _Esperanza._

“Finch,” Reese began to say.

Just as Harold steered the raft toward it, a massive explosion tore through the freighter at water level. Twisting and bending in broken halves, the _Esperanza’s_ pieces began to capsize down beneath the choppy surface of the Hudson. It all happened so fast. The heat of the explosion reached Harold’s face. His eyes went wide. Rain around the wreck vaporized into steam.

The comm link went dead.

In the distance, Harold thought he could hear the percussive thump of a helicopter’s blades on air. The cavalry arriving, too late to make a difference.

Gadzic was dead. Kovačić was likely dead. The Number didn’t even matter anymore. There was no one left to protect but John.

Everything was falling apart.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’d known in the pit of his stomach for a year and a half that when their deaths came, they would be bloody. People in their line of work didn’t grow old at home, surrounded by friends and family. He would never know the peaceful, sterile walls of a hospice nor the creeping dread of dementia. Harold was at peace with that. They were violent men destined for violent ends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, you're still reading this? Cool, thanks. :)

John Reese had almost bled to death so many times that sitting in a puddle of his own blood just about failed to elicit an emotional response.

He’d had a real knack for recollection even before his training. Afterward, his memory bordered on eidetic. He could recall the _first_ time he nearly bled to death with all the dusty, stinking clarity of the present. Like the Sarposha Bazaar was a breath away.

He thought back to that moment: slumped against a stone wall older than his entire country, staring down at the shiv protruding from his ribs, his heartbeat wild and erratic with agitation at how unjust the world was. How could the CIA spend millions of dollars training an operative of his caliber only to somehow fuck up the most important part? The part where with all their infinite knowledge, they’d somehow picked a guy who got shanked by some nineteen-year-old Mujahideen wannabe.

So he’d sat there in the dirt, contributing to the red-brown smudges on the ground at an alarming rate, fingers rapping on the small transmitter tucked inside his belt buckle. He tapped the sad truth to Stanton out in Morse and prepared himself for the worst.

 _At least I made a difference,_ he told himself. At least he was dying for a cause he believed in. Maybe he’d saved some lives. Prevented the next 9/11.

John wished he could reach back through the fabric of space and time and punch that bright-eyed, bushy-tailed idiot in the face.

Not because his idealism was so misplaced—although that was part of it—but because, having now lived through Sarposha and a dozen similar catastrophes, he had perspective on his side.

Cuts healed. Marrow did its job. Human bodies could lose and regenerate a remarkable amount of blood. And even if his particular body did not, even if he bled out against the hard stone wall of a grocer’s, the CIA would keep right on trucking.

What mattered wasn’t the ideal. What mattered was what a man did with his ideals. How he applied them to his own life. How he sculpted himself around those ideals and into something better.

The Agency had sculpted him into something ugly.

There on the deck of the _Esperanza,_ John knew the peace that came from knowing that he had sculpted himself this time.

That being said, he really, _really_ didn’t want to die. He had a lot of work to do.

He hadn’t finished that copy of _The World as Will and Representation_. And he was pretty sure he’d left his backup Uzi on the kitchen counter. He’d meant to give it a good oil and rub-down, but he had Bear that weekend and Bear needed at least three long runs per week—long by working dog standards. Long as in “the entire perimeter of Gramercy Park.” Because as much as the dog had encouraged Harold out and about and as much as John never thought of his partner as _disabled,_ there were things a dog needed.

Dogs needed walking and feeding and a certain amount of play and a dog like Bear especially needed a certain amount of freedom. Some working dogs were bred after all as conscientious objectors—Malamutes, right?—he’d read something about that. And Harold could provide a lot of things for a dog. Because deeper down than the bits of titanium and steel that held him together, Harold was at his core a provider.

At some point John’s train of thought ceased to be about the dog.

The rain hadn’t let up for hours. Freezing and relentless, it washed away his insides before he could even stain the deck. He heard the raindrops as if from a distance, his ears still ringing from the blast below decks.

No, he didn’t want to die thinking dizzily about dogs on the deck of some unimportant shitty smuggling boat. Or at all.

But for the moment, he couldn’t do much other than lie there and breathe and level his P220 at the hatch so that maybe, just maybe, if someone wandered by he could shoot them in the head.

###

He lapsed in and out of consciousness. Sometimes he dreamed.

Men who lived like John did could be divided into two categories: the ones whose pasts haunted them when they went to sleep and the glib sociopaths who couldn’t care less. That idiot in Sarposha had thought himself the latter, had looked Stanton in the eye and said _I love my job._ On some level that had even been true.

It wasn’t that phase of his past that haunted him now, though.

He dreamt of a river not unlike the one he was currently dying on. Except cleaner, fringed with trees. Wiggling worms on hooks in stubby-fingered children’s hands. The looming, watchful silence of Mount Rainier in the distance which given the weather was either protective or menacing.

Before the law of fishes, before eat or be eaten, there was fishing on the Puyallup River.

John wound his reel with patience beyond his years, cautious and deliberate even in childhood. But when his bobber and hook emerged from the river, the worm was gone, snatched away by some clever steelhead.

His mother tsk-tsked. She was laughter and smiles, sunlight spearing through blonde curls, a face that hadn’t appeared clear in his dreams for a long time now. Her hands were warm, a contrast to the cold, stinky dirt she dug through in search of another nightcrawler.

John resented the missing worm and the failure it represented. Children were by their nature spiteful and mercurial. He was no exception. She was laughing again, this time at the look on his face.

She wound the worm around the hook, speared through its heart, careworn hands ending a life for her offspring’s benefit the way mothers had done since the dawn of life.

“It’s not the end of the world, buddy.” She pressed the reel back into his hands. “You can always try again.”

###

Nobody walked through the hatch. Nobody got shot in the head. John dissociated from his body, a deliberate countdown method.

 _Start at ten,_ he remembered Stanton saying. _Feel yourself retreat. Imagine your blood crawling right out of your veins and nestling up in your heart. Then as you count back, float away._

By two he felt outside himself. By three his flesh-and-blood self felt like someone on the other end of a telephone line.

By ten, he watched his body as a stranger. He mumbled some things to Finch that didn’t make a whole lot of sense when he tried to articulate them. He tried to estimate how much time he had left, but that was difficult because he was pretty damn stubborn.

He thought about Owen Island, an incinerator full of leftover teeth. Amateur job.

John would have disposed of them proper-like. Alan Fahey, Alex Declan, whatever the hell the guy’s name was, he sure didn’t know how to scrub a crime scene.

A full-body shiver rocked through John, a moment of frisson that jarred him back into his body. It felt like the harness of a roller coaster: pressure, biting in, fighting against g-force, the ride coming to a gradual end.

“Finch,” he started to say, “I wouldn’t let Fahey pull your teeth out.”

But the freighter blew up.

###

The Zodiac powered over the choppy wakes generated by the _Esperanza’s_ descent. Harold leaned as far forward as his ruined back would let him. The experience wasn’t entirely dissimilar to bringing his De Havilland in for a landing. If you stripped the float plane of its cockpit and replaced its entire fuselage with rubber. He did his best to ignore the rain, racing toward his destination with single-minded purpose.

In the minutes prior to the final explosion, he hadn’t gotten anywhere closer to a plan for how to infiltrate the freighter. Now that decision had been made for him. There was nothing left to infiltrate.

Mindful of the undertow, he cut the Zodiac’s engine and let momentum carry him into the hellish field of debris. A few stubborn fires sputtered on the water’s surface: barrels, an overturned lifeboat, an incongruous sofa, all burning despite the downpour.

Then the bodies.

The Hudson was a charnel house of marine and human parts. Some great force had torn the ship apart from within and spared nothing. He drifted as close as he could, an arm shielding his mouth. He told himself that his held breath was a precaution against fumes and not a ward against the bile rising in his throat.

He could make out the crowd gathered on the opposite bank. The weather kept them at bay, but someone had turned on the overhead halogens of one yard, illuminating a couple dozen horrified onlookers and the looming bulk of distant cranes.

The whole scene was something out of a nightmare.

Worse, actually. Harold had never had dreams this bad.

As far as where to start looking, he had no idea. He scanned the water, squinted through the pelting rain. At some stage, his conscious mind realized that his unconscious mind was seeking the tumbled, ragdoll silhouettes of corpses floating face down.

At some point, he had stopped looking for a survivor.

But once that knowledge crystallized in his consciousness, he would have none of it.

He tapped his earpiece, a futile gesture. “John?”

Nothing. Of course.

 _I will find you,_ he thought. _I will find you even if there’s barely anything left of you to find._

He’d known in the pit of his stomach for a year and a half that when their deaths came, they would be bloody. People in their line of work didn’t grow old at home, surrounded by friends and family. He would never know the peaceful, sterile walls of a hospice nor the creeping dread of dementia. Harold was at peace with that.

He had thrown away that option when he’d stepped out of Grace’s life and into the underworld. For him, it had been deliberate.

They were violent men destined for violent ends.

But going down with scum like Kovačić wasn’t an option.

“I know you’re out there,” he said.

Something surged toward his raft. Harold shot back in surprise, reaching for his axe by reflex.

A ragged figure reached up from the water, hands outstretched like the damned souls of Gustave Doré’s _Inferno_. Reeling. Begging. The man stammered nonsense in a language Harold couldn’t parse. Croatian, given the _Esperanza’s_ crew.

The man’s eyes were so wide they were more white than pupil. He scrabbled at the side of the raft, fingers leaving a crimson trail.

The only English word he managed was a _please._

Harold did something then that he’d sworn never to do. Since his rebirth, his baptism by fire in the ferry bomb that had torn his best friend apart, he had told himself that saving lives was all that mattered. Even lives that most wouldn’t bother to save. Lives like Gadzic’s. Every time he ordered Reese to put bad people behind bars rather than anonymous holes in the dirt, it was because they mattered. Because even bad people deserved a second chance at life.

But the gulf of grey area between good and bad had widened in those eighteen months in one noticeable way.

Without thinking, Harold beat at the man’s hands with the butt of his axe, fending him off, damning him back into the river. He fired up the outboard and left the smuggler to drown. He forced himself to stare down into the dying man’s eyes. He memorized the lines of terror and pain twisting on his face.

This was his penance. This was the price he paid.

With sudden gravity, he knew he’d let every man on that ship drown in fear and agony if it meant he could get Reese out safely. So he made himself watch.

And then he took that knowledge, packed it up tightly, and nestled it away in the depths of himself for safekeeping. The helicopters would be on site soon, weather or no weather. He would stay as long as he could, and in that time he had work to do.

###

Battered by rain, the Zodiac bobbed unevenly under him as Harold navigated the wreck site. He nudged debris aside with care, both to clear himself a path and to aid his search.

Gunfire erupted to his left. Four shots, one right after the other.

Harold threw himself onto the raft’s floor, water splashing up into his mouth. He gagged and held his breath. Something in his rotator cuff twinged. Nobody returned fire.

Enough hours spent listening to Reese fill people full of lead had given him an ear for gunfights. He knew all four shots were fired by the same weapon, a .45 or some similar handgun if not mistaken. How there was anyone left alive trying to kill each other in this mess was anyone’s guess.

Unless it was someone trying to catch his attention.

Pulling himself upright, he squinted in the direction of the gunshots, but the damned rain and the complete lack of light meant he couldn’t _see_ anything. Just waterlogged shapes in the dark. Too little detail for him to make out--planks or pieces of something, that sofa which had been burning earlier.

And that overturned lifeboat.

He pulled the rudder, the raft taking a sharp left. He didn’t let himself believe. Shrewd and mechanical, he went through the motions, his brain rattling off if-then-if-then-if-then so that he could distract himself from hope.

Closer, he could see it: someone was using the lifeboat for cover. Or at least as a flotation device. Harold knew there was a severe likelihood this person would drill him full of holes if he got close enough. But he weighed the if-then and it was a chance he let himself take.

Why hadn’t he brought a flashlight?

The raft nudged up against the lifeboat with a harmless, rubbery bonk.

And there was Harold’s partner, hooked to the ruined lifeboat by a single arm, pistol dangling from his white-knuckled hand.

“John?” He shouted into the rain, every muscle in his body stiff. In this state of heightened tension and stress, he could feel the bite of steel in his neck and hip, the bits of metal that held him together. They had never felt like a part of him. He thought about them now because it was an easier thing to think about than what he’d do if Reese didn’t move.

But he did. He lifted his head, squinting through the water, face pale as another one of Doré’s ghosts. His lips moved, words stolen away by the rain.

It took every last reserve of strength in Harold’s body to haul Reese into the raft. And if his much larger partner hadn’t been at least half-conscious, Harold doubted he could have done it at all.

Spotlights glimmered in the choppy water not far away. Above them, two helicopters circled, further from the river’s surface than usual due to the inclement weather. The rain had done them this one good thing.

###

Harold pushed the Zodiac’s outboard to its absolute limit. Wind whipped at his hood. Face numb, hands frozen, eyes squinted, he sped off down the river. His rendezvous point with Enright wasn’t far away. Priority number one was putting distance between the raft and the crime scene. Then getting Reese to help.

The van could wait. Fuck the van. He would detonate it remotely if necessary.

Enright would be waiting at a private jetty in Irvington. Their destination was just across the tracks.

On the waterlogged floor of the raft, Reese was sallow with blood loss but still semi-awake. If just a couple things went right for Harold, they could get him to the clinic in time.

He wasn’t a faithful man. How could someone who’d birthed an artificial intelligence be? But he did send a small thought out into the cosmic void: _have we put enough good into the world to earn some back?_


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “They’re here,” Maddie said. Amy jolted, having fallen half asleep. But she roused herself quickly, zipping up her coat and blinking herself back to consciousness.  
> “All right, Mads.” Amy leaned over, pressed a quick kiss of encouragement to her wife’s brow. “Let’s repay some favors.”  
> They pulled up their hoods and stepped out into the downpour.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back to work now, so may only have time to update twice per week. Will do my best though!

Amy Enright tapped her fingertips on the Forester’s steering wheel, rhythmless and idle. Beside her, Maddie shifted in her seat every now and again, her brow furrowed. She did that thing where she kept nervously brushing her bangs out of her eyes again and again, tucking them behind her glasses. Amy tried and failed to hide the tiny pang of affection she felt at the gesture. A smile twitched onto her mouth, unwitting.

“Hey.” Amy reached out and snagged Maddie’s wrist, giving her a Look. “Fussing won’t make them get here any quicker.”

Maddie shot her a brief, rueful smile. Her eyes were slightly sunken, the tight and drawn look they got sometimes when she hadn’t been sleeping.

Of course, she’d been in surgery for eleven hours earlier. Then home, dinner, and barely enough sleep to qualify as a nap before her phone chimed over and over.

When she hadn’t picked up, the home phone had started up a minute later. Then Amy’s phone.

Somehow, on some intuitive level, Amy had known.

Who else would call them up in the middle of the night, pestering them until Maddie relented? Even the administrators at NYG weren’t that cruel. And if it was anyone else, Maddie wouldn’t have given in. She had a stubborn streak as broad as the Grand Canyon and wasn’t the type to let wrongs go unnoticed.

“I’m sorry,” Maddie spoke up from the passenger’s seat. “I should have told you.” But despite her apology, the troubled wrinkle on her brow vanished.

Amy let her shoulders roll back in an easy shrug.

“Mads, I knew long hours were part of the package deal when I married a surgeon.”

That got a smile out of Maddie, who thumbed at her wedding ring. They’d been one of the first eager couples flocking to the courthouse after Governor Cuomo signed the Act. Reckless and impulsive, according to the religious side of Amy’s family, but _if you love her that much_ …

“Besides.” Amy looked out the window, staring out over the wharf and the persistent rain that battered it. “They saved my ass. I kind of owe them one. Or a lot more than one.”

“And apart from that, they’re good people,” Maddie said. Her tone was one of protest, but Amy didn’t exactly disagree. She wondered if her wife was trying to convince herself.

Maddie’s phone buzzed on the dashboard. She snatched it up, eyes scanning the screen. Then she flipped it over to show the message to Amy, who pursed a small frown.

_Got him,_ the message read, sender unknown. _Worse than we thought. En route._

Maddie tucked her phone away and turned a look over her shoulder, out the SUV’s back window. They’d be meeting the mysterious Mr. Crane at the jetty, then transporting a wounded individual to a location of Mr. Crane’s choosing. The whole thing was very cloak and dagger.

“Any idea what it actually is?” Amy couldn’t help it. Her curiosity was a palpable thing, a little burning flicker in her chest. She didn’t know whether to be nervous or not until she knew what they were up against.

“He never told me,” Maddie said. “We made an… arrangement, sort of. Back when. I told him if there was ever anything I could do, you know?” She turned up both hands, a gesture of surrender. “He said in his line of work, he sometimes comes across people who need ‘services’ like mine.”

“How vague.”

“Look,” Maddie reclined back in her seat, unable to sit still. “After what they did for you? I’d hop out of bed and drive to a pier in the middle of the night without question. And this isn’t the worst or weirdest thing I’d do.”

A grin tugged at Amy’s mouth, her eyebrows shooting up. She caught Maddie’s eye.

“Not the weirdest thing you’d do, huh? And what _is_ the weirdest thing you’d do?”

Maddie, startled out of her anxiety, laughed and thumped her head back against the seat’s headrest.

“Jesus, I married a child.”

But she reached out and took Amy’s hand all the same. Amy squeezed, running her thumb over Maddie’s knuckles, a gesture both possessive and reassuring.

###

Harold’s world was water and noise. Wind and rain and the distant chaos of the _Esperanza’s_ destruction. Two helicopters—dark, menacing, the type John would undoubtedly know the make and model of—circled the mess in the water. Harold left their spotlights behind, peeking back over his shoulder just once.

From the rubbery floor of the boat, Reese let out a quiet groan. Or perhaps it was a loud groan that sounded quiet given the hellish noise all around them. Harold couldn’t know for sure.

Comforting people in times of distress had never been a strength of Harold’s. In fact, his presence tended to have the polar opposite effect. And attempting comforting words while piloting a wobbly raft along rough water in the rain would be an even taller order.

_The storm,_ Harold thought, something clicking into place in his mind. _That’s what reminded him of Owen Island._

Keeping one hand on the rudder, Harold pulled a glove off and reached down. He let the flat of his knuckles rest against Reese’s cheekbone. The tiniest gesture of reassurance possible. Wordless but with the weight of many words behind it.

_I’m here. You’re going to be all right. We’re going somewhere safe. I have a contingency. You are not alone._

Harold had always excelled at priorities. At time management. When tackling a big project, he built a hierarchy and attacked it rung by rung. It was the efficient thing to do.

The priorities of his current situation were clear, there was no question of that. But he found himself wanting to disregard the hierarchy entirely.

It made sense. It would get them out safe. But it felt _wrong._

That wrongness settled in his stomach like poison. He imagined it curdling in his gut, turning his bile to acid, eating him from the inside out ‘til only bones were left.

He supposed that had always been a difference between him and Reese. Wet work was all about compartmentalizing, about putting yourself and your concerns aside for the sake of getting the job done.

Harold would do that. He would get the job done. But he’d never been trained to shunt things aside like his partner had. More than anything, he wanted to cut the motor, determine the severity of Reese’s injuries, and _do something._

The thought was like a breeze, slipping into him fleetingly: he wanted to hold Reese’s hand.

That type of contact, that level of intimacy was a facet of human interaction that had never felt natural to him. It had felt like putting himself through a routine, puppeting his own body into the proper posture of contrition or concern.

He thought of Nathan. He thought of Grace. He considered the weight of a book in his hands, pressed into hers with urgent anticipation, how natural those movements had finally felt. _Take this and all it represents,_ his hands had said. _I’m finally ready._

His fingertips grazed Reese’s face with that same instinctive compulsion.

But he set his sights on the hierarchy. There would be time for comfort later. Madeleine Enright had hands better equipped for healing than he did anyway.

###

Were he a less confident man, Harold might have worried he’d miss their particular jetty, but the thought crossed his mind but once. He deflected it with ease. The sheer importance of the task before him meant that failure was not an option.

Harold performed best when failure was not an option.

He slowed the Zodiac, then cut the motor and steered hard to port, seeking out familiar silhouettes in the dark. The distant lines of a train station and three cranes that marked their rendezvous point came slowly into view, sheeted with rain.

Reese curled one hand around Harold’s wrist with none of his usual restrained strength.

That was all Harold could give him right now. Just one point of wordless contact. Enough to anchor both of them to the world.

“We’re here, John.” He pitched his voice low. There was no way Reese would have heard him anyway, eardrums blown out as they were. He was speaking for his own benefit.

In the murky dark behind him, Harold felt a presence at his back. The hackles on his neck rose as if caressed by a chilled breeze. He turned his upper body as much as he could, but apart from wind and rain and distant carnage, there was nothing.

Paranoia creeping in, he turned a furtive look up and down the river, then up toward the sky.

The word swept in on the wind, a single entreaty soft as a whisper: _Please._

Harold snapped a look down toward the water, half-expecting the wide-eyed, bleeding smuggler to be there somehow. He knew his fear defied all reason, but he looked nonetheless. And of course, there was nothing.

_Please just settle down,_ he chastised himself. He didn’t have time for this, not now.

###

“They’re here,” Maddie said. Amy jolted, having fallen half asleep. But she roused herself quickly, zipping up her coat and blinking herself back to consciousness.

“All right, Mads.” Amy leaned over, pressed a quick kiss of encouragement to her wife’s brow. “Let’s repay some favors.”

They pulled up their hoods and stepped out into the downpour.

###

The Subaru was a poor excuse for an ambulance, but every other thing in Harold’s world had gone wrong in a spectacular way, so it barely bothered him.

Lifting Reese up out of the raft was an easier task with two able-bodied assistants. Maddie’s professional concerns brought to mind proper backboarding and lifting techniques for potential spinal injuries. Harold informed her that his professional concerns had been more along the lines of getting Reese there in one piece, pardon the lack of proper technique.

“You did the best you could,” Maddie said as they eased Reese into the Subaru’s bed with care.

“We’ll see if that was good enough.”

For the first time since discovering him among the wreckage, Harold had the opportunity to get a good look at Reese. And to evaluate the extent of his injuries. Standing there beside the SUV, no barriers between them now, he was beset by a grim reluctance.

In the dark, he still had the option to pretend it wasn’t so bad.

Not that he would. He was a realist. He took little comfort in delusions.

But having yet another choice stripped away from him stung more than it otherwise would.

When he willed himself to look down, he wished he hadn’t.

Maddie had already started to work, although her exploration of Reese’s injuries was cautious and hands-off for now. Her pale gloves were already slick with blood. In Harold’s new line of work, he’d been exposed to most forms that human cruelty took. His initial surprise at just how much blood a body contained had not lasted. His unease stemmed less from squeamishness than from a simple abhorrence of suffering.

Reese was suffering. That much was clear.

( _Like you left the man in the water to suffer, Harold?_ The thought simmered on the backburner of his mind.)

Reese’s features had gone pallid, the muscles of his face slack as though maintaining any expression at all was too much effort. He was breathing, albeit shallow and through his mouth. His eyes were shut, one swollen that way. Not unlike the drowning man had looked: pale, desperate.

Harold had left that man to die while risking his life to save this one. He was too keyed up for the hypocrisy to sting too much yet, but it lodged in him like a barb, a thing he had a subtle awareness of at all times.

When Maddie touched at the Kevlar vest Reese wore, he knit his brows together, the tiniest spasm of movement.

“Is he awake?” Harold asked before he knew he was asking it.

“Hard to say,” Maddie said.

Violence from the past snuck up on him, a recollection he didn’t want: a fevered waking dream about triage in a ferry terminal. Doctors and EMTs with drawn faces. Sheets more red than white.

Harold knew everything Maddie’s “hard to say” implied.

_Why did we buy white vests?_ The white just highlighted the mess.

He jerked back from the Subaru’s hatch as though struck, then limped toward the driver’s seat. Marching off to war again.

But Amy Enright stood between him and the wheel. She wore a dark purple raincoat, wisps of windswept blonde bangs jutting from beneath the hood. She hadn’t said much since she’d helped wrestle Reese from the Zodiac.

“Mr. Crane,” she pitched her voice over the rain, squinted to regard him better. “I’ve got this. Just tell me where to go.”

Harold admired the determination in her eyes, the way she set her jaw, the stubborn jut of her chin. She was taking this much better than he’d anticipated.

“Are you—” he began to ask.

“Don’t ask me if I’m sure. Your friend back there is the only reason I’m alive.” She pulled the Subaru’s door open and climbed inside. “He needs you more back there than up here.”

He knew better than to sit all the way in back. He’d seen the way Maddie Enright took control in the operating theatre and he knew he’d get in the way. So he climbed into the backseat and buckled in.

“Colefax Avenue,” he told Amy. “Irvington Veterinary and Supply. It will look abandoned, but it isn’t.”

Amy angled the rear-view mirror back so she could look Harold in the eye, then nodded.

To Maddie, he said: “The clinic has everything you could possibly need.”

Shut away indoors, sheltered from the rain, Harold couldn’t help but notice how loud the sudden silence was. He could hear and see again. But all the nearby sights and sounds were terrible.

Amy didn’t hesitate. She gunned the Subaru out of the parking lot and into the night. Meanwhile, Maddie shifted and rustled in the backseat, undoubtedly doing her best to ensure Reese remained stable on the drive.

Harold was the only one with nothing to do. He sat in petrified quiet for the first few minutes of the drive before a mumble from the backseat broke the silence.

“It’s not too late, is it?”

Turning around as quick as his fused spine would allow, Harold peered into the Subaru’s backseat. Reese had just spoken. Nonsense words in a slurred mumble, but words nonetheless.

“No, John, it’s not.” He replied on reflex, staring down.

Maddie had cleaned many of the smaller scrapes and cuts along Reese’s skin. The sleeves of both his suit jacket and dress shirt had been cut away, lying in tatters along the Subaru’s trunk. She’d also applied a compress to the bottom of his tactical vest and was currently holding it in place with one hand, the glove slippery with red. Two heavy-duty duffels were shoved up against the seat where Harold sat, their contents disgorged all over the place as Maddie worked. Gauze, scissors, iodine pads, the list went on.

She caught him looking and nodded downward.

“I’m not going to remove the vest until we’re in an OR,” she explained. “It’s kind of… holding everything together.”

Harold could have thrown up.

“Of course,” he managed to say instead. “I trust your judgement entirely, Miss Enright.”

Delirious and unseeing, Reese’s eyes rolled backward toward the sound of Harold’s voice. He stared, likely not actually comprehending what he saw, and continued to mumble nonsense while Harold strove with all his might not to pay attention, to block it out, reminding himself that it was best if he just stayed out of Enright’s way.

Riding in the backseat had been a mistake. Since he wasn’t driving or playing medic, he had nothing to occupy his mind. Or his hands. He rapped his fingers on a thigh, twitchy and uncomfortable.

This was the worst part. He’d chewed through his hierarchy with determination. Priority one—get Reese off the boat and into Maddie’s care—was complete. Everything from there depended on other people. On Amy to ferry them to their destination, then on Maddie to…

… to do her best, he supposed.

Crowded in by his own helplessness, Harold stared at a window, watching the distant landscape of the rail yard fly by. Amy was driving with some urgency, which might have concerned him under any other circumstances. But he knew he’d be doing the same.

He’d broken just about every rule they’d set for themselves.

If Reese had done what he did, Harold would have been furious.

Yet here he was.

“You should talk to him,” Maddie said from the backseat. “He responded to your voice.”

But Harold had no idea what to say.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harold heard someone calling for a pair of scissors, the clatter of metal on metal, the pneumatic hiss of the fridge’s door. He had already known that he did not want to watch Enright operate on John Reese. But until Amy led him away, he didn’t realize that not watching was even an option.
> 
> The relief could have buckled him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some background spoilers here for Harold. As far as "current events" go this story takes place in S2, but it will have background spoilers for both Finch and Reese that are only revealed later on in S3 and S4, so take care if you are trying to avoid spoiling yourself!

Sitting in the backseat of the Enrights’ SUV, his heartbeat staccato with nerves, Harold tried to think of something worth saying. His mind rarely failed him, but the adrenaline that had kept him going for the last few hours was running low. A crash was imminent. He could feel himself growing fuzzy and frayed around the edges.

A story? He could tell Reese a story. Something comforting. But nothing sprang immediately to mind.

“I never told you about the others, John.” He paused, twisting his upper body as best he could so that he could pitch his voice to the rear of the car without actually looking down. “Though I’m sure you guessed they existed. The world is full of fortuitous happenstance but neither of us is that lucky.”

He briefly caught Maddie’s eyes. She gave him a slow, encouraging nod, though her features were all business. She stared down at Reese with single-minded intensity. Harold recalled her bent over Oliver Veldt in the operating theatre, the steely resolve of her nerves even in the face of the unthinkable.

“There were two prior to you,” he said, mostly to keep himself talking. “A man and a woman. Neither lasted long.”

He consciously opted not to mention Dillinger. By this point, layering lies of omission into the same carefully-constructed wall as truth, brick by brick, was instinct. Dillinger’s identity could be traced to enough of Harold’s handiwork even if not Harold himself.

The Subaru hit a pothole and jerked to one side. Harold grabbed the back of his seat to steady himself.

“Shane Potter was the first.” Second, but nobody needed to know that, not now. “I researched him exhaustively, as you can imagine. He had the perfect pedigree: former Navy SEAL turned salvage and recovery diver. A curriculum vitae that stretched for miles.”

Shane with his thousand-watt smile and his easy, encouraging manner. An individual so similar to John Reese in background, yet they couldn’t have been more different.

“Shane was what you’d call a ‘true believer.’” Harold laughed despite himself. “He looked up to me, heaven knows why. Wanted to be my friend as well as my colleague.”

He dared to look down. Reese was watching him. His squinted, sunken eyes had just the barest hint of clarity. One half of his mouth twitched up in an awkward attempt at a smile. His smiles were awkward most of the time, so this at least was nothing new.

“We worked together for just shy of two months. My method was not nearly so refined then. We saved a handful of people, made a few embarrassing messes. Compared to what you’re used to, Mr. Reese, it was an amateur affair.” Harold cleared his throat. “Then out of nowhere, Shane suffered a stroke.”

There was some galling unfairness to that. But at the same time, Harold hadn’t been entirely surprised. Several years of high school and college football combined with rigorous diving meant Shane was more susceptible than most. The Machine couldn’t have foretold it. It was just a freak accident.

“Fortunately he survived, but he was no longer suitable for the job. I haven’t spoken to him in some time, but last I heard he’s convalescing well, repairing boats into a ripe old age he thought he’d probably never see.”

And receiving a generous monthly stipend from his former employer, a Mr. Harold Vogel.

The discomfort he felt—and it was no small discomfort—at disclosing these facts to Reese itched under his skin like a rash. Not that his partner didn’t deserve to know, he supposed. It would hardly damage their working relationship for Reese to know he wasn’t Harold’s first, so to speak. And at this particular moment, it mattered even less.

_Old habits,_ he thought.

Madeleine Enright leaned back on her knees, hands leaving Reese’s body for the first time since she began.

“I’ve done everything I can until we’re somewhere better equipped,” she said. “He’s going to need blood and x-rays before I’m able to do much more.”

Harold closed his eyes and wheezed out a relieved breath.

“Our facility will have that covered.” He rubbed at the bridge of his nose, running through his mental checklists. For a frantic moment, he was convinced there must be _something_ he’d forgotten. Some key surgical component they’d discover was missing upon arrival.

“So, Mr. Crane,” she said. “What happened to your second helper?”

She could see him unraveling, couldn’t she? She was trying to pull him up and out of it. Bless her; she really was good at this. At any other time, Harold might have been mortified by an outsider asking him a question like that. But he knew where Maddie’s motivations lay. It wasn’t the information she cared about.

He’d have to thank her later. Privately.

“Oh, well, hm,” he hummed once. “Different story altogether. Felicia, she robbed me blind.”

The Forester rolled to a halt.

From the driver’s seat, Amy said, “We’re here.”

Felicia would be a story for a different day, then.

###

Amy bristled at the sight of another car in the parking lot—an instinct which Harold both noted and admired.

“Don’t be alarmed, Miss Enright. Surgery is an impossible task for a single pair of hands. These are Madeleine’s assistants.”

During their drive, the rain had abated to a persistent drizzle. Harold wiped his glasses on the interior of his jacket, then slipped outside and limped to the clinic’s back door. He fired off a code into the keypad, then pulled the heavy door open until it latched that way. A frenetic quickness clipped his every movement, his hands fidgety and halting.

Just because they’d reached their destination didn’t mean time was no longer a factor.

He met Kelly Princeton—a limber, athletic shadow in the murky night—at the door, directing her inside for a stretcher. One of their earliest cases, Kelly was a pathologist who’d found herself under the thumb of a minor Mafioso, pressured into faking post-mortem results. Not an ideal surgical partner for Madeleine Enright, but Harold had to make do with the few people he trusted.

Well, trusted at least that much.

###

The next several minutes were a blur. Yelling and rain and haste. Madeleine and Kelly directed the flow of bodies, the former like a conductor and the latter a competent majordomo.

Every muscle in Harold’s body tensed as he hurried into the OR. He’d organized the fit-out for this place from the bottom up, but apart from a couple periodic checks, he’d never set foot in it. He preferred not to set foot in these types of places _ever._

“Damn,” Amy said from his flank, staring.

Irvington Veterinary and Supply had closed about three years ago, but its intact storefront and layout made it a perfect asset. Harold had four such clinics, each kitted out to cater to trauma of the worst kind. Cool blue fluorescents, easy on tired eyes. Gleaming stainless steel. The OR may have catered originally to neutering cats and dogs, but now it could hold its own against most small hospitals.

As was his wont, he’d spared no expense when it came to quality and security. As was also his wont, he found he’d neglected creature comforts. This occurred to Harold when he suddenly, desperately wished for a comfortable chair to collapse into.

“Donor blood?” someone was asking. Harold pointed to the wall fridge. Kelly and her two helpers—had Harold even asked their names?—doled out sterilized instruments while Madeleine acquainted herself with the room’s layout.

Harold didn’t look at the gurney, found himself staring up into the cool-toned lights instead.

Someone brushed his arm. Startled back into the present, he blinked sideways. Amy Enright was watching him, her mouth pursed into a thoughtful line.

“How long has it been since you slept, Mr. Crane?”

“That’s not particularly relevant,” he began to say, but Amy twitched her head sideways.

“I see that look a lot at home. You’re fading. You’re not gonna be of any use to anyone if you’re asleep on your feet.”

She grabbed his arm and steered him around, toward the hallway.

“There’s some sofas in the lobby,” she said. “Let’s have a sit and let Maddie work.”

Harold heard someone calling for a pair of scissors, the clatter of metal on metal, the pneumatic hiss of the fridge’s door. He had already known that he did not want to watch Enright operate on John Reese. But until Amy led him away, he didn’t realize that not watching was even an option.

The relief could have buckled him.

###

In 1969, the 16th Avenue Bridge in Cedar Rapids closed for good. An outdated, unsafe structure—yet one that stuck in Harold’s childhood memory. The low-stretched arches and closed-spandrel design were rumored by urban legend to mirror those of a famous bridge in Prague.

The understanding that most children his age weren’t fussed with urban legends on the origin of a bridge was slow-dawning, but it broke over him eventually. One of life’s hard truths.

From that moment onward, the bridge was something Harold carried in his heart like a private totem. Every time they drove into Cedar Rapids, he’d keep an eye out for it.

The elements, both natural and human, claimed the bridge an inch at a time. Like the same earth it was sculpted from was slowly subsuming it back. Little by little, the spandrels began to crumble. The concrete discolored. Graffiti appeared on the struts, just the harmless scribbles of aimless kids with a desperate need to make their mark on the world _somehow._

Harold could identify with that. His world was crumbling, too.

The bridge’s decay was strangely fractal, mirroring the decay of larger systems in his life in that funny way all of life tended to be a microcosm of something bigger. The core traits that made Harold’s father the man he knew and loved were eroding. The population of Interior Least Terns on the nearby islands was eroding, too.

So all in life mirrored all else.

One night in 1979, Harold Wren staggered out of downtown Cedar Rapids, frustrated and mildly drunk. He walked until the sidewalk beneath his boots became the well-worn concrete of the 16th Avenue Bridge.

By then, years of disuse had crumbled it into something nearly unrecognizable. Its concrete surface was slick with mildew, kind of greenish.

Something about its state of disrepair galled him. It wasn’t _right._ There was a fundamental, unsettling wrongness that sent shudders through his shoulders and sprung tears into the corners of his eyes and _why did he even care,_ why did it even matter to him that all those idiot kids who carved their names into its surface were engaging in such a pointless exercise.

They’d demolish it soon. Someday. Somebody. There was no escaping entropy.

The only way for a man to truly make his mark on the world was through action.

Yet in spite of that, Harold fished a small leather case from his pocket. He selected his sharpest screwdriver, which would fill in as a chisel.

He didn’t carve his name. The FBI was already sniffing around his affairs. Even if the bridge would someday be rubble and dust, he balked at the thought of his name on anything in Iowa less ephemeral than a sheet of paper. That was too close to the truth.

When they blew the bridge in the 80s, the column bearing his parents’ initials crumbled to nothing. Harold had long since left Iowa, but he spared the bridge a thought. A swift, decisive end was better than the slow whittling of erosion. If he could someday be so lucky.

###

Harold told himself that he wouldn’t sleep. That he couldn’t, in case they needed something. In case Reese needed something.

Yet he woke an indeterminate number of hours later, reclined back on a dusty leather sofa, a woollen doggy blanket draped over his lap. He palmed at his face, the last traces of a dream evaporating behind his eyes.

Something about a bridge crumbling away into water.

The present rushed back in, an unkind truth that spared no one.

Who’d given him a blanket, anyway?

###

The culprit was sitting in one of the exam rooms, busily rearranging a table to hold several boxes of Chinese take-out, a few plastic-wrapped sandwiches, and several bottles of water.

Amy glanced up when Harold limped in. He loitered in the doorway, unable to shake the feeling that he’d interrupted her, that he’d somehow walked in on something that wasn’t his business.

“They’re still in surgery,” she said before he could ask. So he didn’t say anything.

Snagging a bottle and twisting its cap off, Amy tilted it his way in offering.

Having shed her raincoat and outer layers, she looked much younger. She wore a simple purple t-shirt over skinny jeans with a long, draping cardigan. Her blonde fringe was swept to one side in a style that emphasized her thoughtful squint.

She looked so anachronistic in this sterile, clinical place. An off-duty guardian angel here to soften the blow for all of them.

Harold took the bottle of water, then looked over the spread of food. Alarms rang in the back of his head.

“Did you—” But Amy interrupted again.

“No, I drove. You were out for about four hours. I went almost to the parkway. Just in case.”

When he was finally possessed of his faculties again, the only thing Harold could think to say was, “Thank you.”

They pecked at food in silence, waiting for news. He thought about bridges and the slow decay they couldn’t fight.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, had a lot of catching up to do on the work front. This chapter has some mildly gory medical details if that is a trigger for you, all presented from a clinical perspective. Thanks to everyone who's still reading!

The gunshot to John Rooney’s abdomen wasn’t anywhere near the worst Madeleine Enright had seen. She directed the operation with the cool detachment of NASA mission control, and if a hint of tension tightened her chest when she breathed, nobody knew. A little bit of tension was good, as long as it stayed inside. That was what differentiated her from some of the high-flying hotheads that congregated in any hospital’s surgical department, NY General no exception.

By some miracle, the projectile’s fragmenting had been minimal, although she knew better than to remove the shards in haste. Her team busied themselves: they cleaned the wounds, cauterized blood vessels with steady, dedicated hands. The tall, thin-faced white woman Harold had called in to assist her took over the transfusions.

All the while, Maddie tried not to think about whose life it was she held in her hands. The debt she owed this man stretched beyond the boundary of what could be repaid, even with lifesaving surgery. When Rooney and Mr. Crane had saved Amy, they hadn’t just saved Maddie’s spouse. They hadn’t just returned to her the most precious part of her life. They’d restored her flagging belief in goodness.

The second-worst spiral she’d fallen into, held hostage in that operating room, was that everything righteous had gone from the world. (The first of course being that she _could not_ afford to lose Amy. She’d go crazy.) She’d blinked back tears, staring at the ceiling, wondering if it was true that the God her parents had raised her so faithfully to trust had abandoned her.

She’d shied away from God—or at least from Church—as a teenager. Easy to do, growing up with the knowledge that her more devout family members would just as soon see her disowned.

The appearance of Rooney and Crane in her life had almost been enough for her to give God a second chance.

If nothing else, she believed in human righteousness again.

“Careful,” she instructed, gesturing toward one of Kelly Princeton’s hands. The middle-aged pathologist made for a strange partner in the OR, but she was glad to have _someone_ to help shoulder the effort.

“Past all that swelling, I think he might have an intestinal perforation.”

The OR came equipped with an x-ray machine, which had been a big help, but they never picked up everything. And an internal tear could occur even after the shrapnel was long gone.

_Speaking of shrapnel,_ she thought involuntarily. She couldn’t help but make note of the topography of scars that was John Rooney’s body. He’d seen his share of shrapnel, all right. She spotted the telltale keloid line of a ligament reconstruction on his skin. Six of his ribs showed the faint discoloration of healed fractures on the x-ray films. As did his collarbone.

Almost all of it seemed old, at least. Perhaps whatever Mr. Crane had him doing, he’d finally learned how to do it with less risk to his own person.

Until tonight.

###

Her face blanched in the training hospital’s bathroom, Maddie Enright clutched her stomach and tried to keep from hyperventilating. She’d shown up at rotations just in time to see on the board that the _very first procedure of the day_ was hers. An AV fistula to prepare a patient for dialysis.

Logically, she knew the AV fistula procedure was well within the scope of her talents.

Emotionally, logic be damned, she still felt like throwing up.

Yet when she walked into the theatre, a cool calm descended on her like a thin layer of silk. Despite the watchful eyes all around her—both in the theatre with her and in observation—she felt centered and settled and collected and sure that she would succeed. She had to. There was too much riding on it.

She’d shown them, all of them. From the teachers who questioned the dedication of her solid B-average grades to the tut-tutting family members who suggested maybe a medical school in a less _liberal_ area would lead to _fewer temptations_. She’d shown James, that one sneering classmate who’d called her an affirmative action hire behind her back in residence.

_Hey, Jimmy, what do you call an affirmative action hire who makes it through residency?_

Her attending—a mentor she respected—guided her step by step, even though she’d performed the procedure on a cadaver before. The delicate instruments of vascular manipulation felt like something fine and flimsy in her fingers, like they didn’t weigh enough to be real. She could scarcely believe the power they contained.

With care, she surgically adhered the patient’s cephalic vein to the brachial artery via anastomosis. She secured each suture, a master’s guidance at her back. Her heart didn’t hammer like she thought it would. Her hands were still as stone.

Though it was years ago, she remembered the gentle brush of fingertips across blood vessels, palpating, searching. The patient’s distal pulse was strong.

She felt the strength of the woman’s pulse beneath her own hand, each beat of her heart strengthening the resolve in Maddie’s own.

She had done it.

She _could_ do it.

Yes, she would.

###

Six hours of painstaking surgery later, she had done what she could for John Rooney. Princeton looked wiped, her face sunken, brow matted with sweat. Maddie imagined she didn’t look much better. She peeled her gloves, smock, and mask off, then threw them all into the closest disposal bin.

Her team dispersed without much chatter between them. Not that Maddie was surprised. They were all exhausted. Though the surgery had gone as well as could be expected, nobody with Rooney’s injuries was ever safe from complications after one op.

It was time to tell Harold Crane.

The second she broke the news to him, she understood everything.

“All things considered, I think it went very well,” she said, as reassuring as she could manage. “Judging by all his scars, this isn’t his first rodeo.”

She saw it in the way Crane’s hands tightened into involuntary fists, the desperate wideness of his eyes before he schooled his face into something more neutral. Still concerned, less frantic. The expression was a momentary thing, but she’d caught it.

“You don’t have to spare me the details, Miss Enright,” he said.

She cast a sidelong look to Amy, but continued.

“He’s lucky it was just a handgun this time. Lowest-velocity projectile, less chance of infection than a shotgun or rifle.” _Both of which it looks like he’s tangled with before,_ she didn’t add. “We removed the fragments that were in a position to cause damage down the line, but it’s standard procedure not to worry too much about anything that’s just lodged in soft tissue.”

Crane watched her, attention rapt.

“He lost a lot of blood, which can come with complications of its own. And we’re giving him a course of antibiotics. The bullet nicked his iliac crest. As far as pelvic fractures go it’s very minor, but it increases the chance of an infection.”

Crane removed his glasses and polished them with a sleeve. He exhaled. Maddie had seen behavior like this innumerable times, that sort of ceaseless, fruitless twitching. Impotent anger at a thing that couldn’t be helped or changed by anything but the passage of time.

“Before I lost contact with him, he said he was having problems with his legs. Are you sure his spine isn’t damaged?”

Taking a chance, Maddie reached out and placed a hand on Crane’s forearm. He used his other hand to place his glasses back in position.

“Mister Crane,” she said, “I assure you the bullet didn’t pass anywhere near his spine. Sometimes, swelling in the spinal canal can cause nerve symptoms in the legs. Especially with a pelvic fracture. Little bits of bone can irritate the tissue, compress the nerves. Think of it like carpal tunnel syndrome.”

“And based on all this, his prognosis?”

It took near-Herculean effort to contort her face into a smile. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d run so long on so little sleep. Her residency, maybe.

“It’s too early to say he’s out of the woods yet, but things could have been a lot worse. We’ll monitor his bloods, keep an eye out for infection, and take a few more x-rays when the swelling’s gone down.”

Crane straightened up almost imperceptibly. It was like he stood a little taller when he had hope on his side.

Taking the moment of silence as her cue, Amy slid over to Maddie’s side, arms wrapping around her tight as a straight jacket, bloodstained shirt and all. She squeezed, pressed a brief but tender kiss to the side of Maddie’s neck.

“You’re the best,” Amy murmured.

Too drained for a flirtatious _I know,_ Maddie just looped an arm around her wife’s waist. Relief hung above them all like a cloud, something gossamer nobody dared to reach for just yet.

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There was a sort of grim honesty in the way pathologists spoke about human bodies. John preferred it to doctors who dealt primarily with living patients. People like he and Kelly Princeton shared a secret language of the dead. The living found it off-putting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back in the saddle! Hope you are all having a cheery holiday season.

Coming out from under anesthesia was a gradual thing. John didn’t _wake_ so much as incrementally gain awareness of things. The cool dark of his current location was a far cry from the frigid lap of the Hudson at his neck. He felt godawful, but less godawful than he knew he should.

When he managed to open his eyes, the blue-lit walls and polished chrome of the clinic’s interior set him ill at ease. He did not remember the journey to this place. Historically, when he woke in foreign places with no idea how he got there, it was never for innocent reasons.

The sedatives blurred too much of the border between past and present. He recalled the general events of the night prior—Gadzic’s death, the freighter’s deck listing with sudden violence—but couldn’t dredge up anything but fragments beyond.

He struggled to remember. Struggling made him so tired, though.

Fading back into dull, unrefreshing sleep, he held on as long as he could, listening. But the room was soundless save for the sandpaper-on-granite rasp of his own breath.

###

“You ever see stars like this back in the States, Sarge?”

Gomez popped a stick of chewing gum between his teeth, held the pack out. John slid one free and folded it into his mouth.

“I come from a real small town,” he said. Ignoring the fact that he’d never been a man who looked up at the stars. Not since he was very small.

“I grew up in Sylmar, outside LA. Not many stars out that way. But damn, took a trip to Yellowstone as a kid once. Stars as far as the eye could see. Saw Old Faithful in the moonlight, too.”

Their Rangers platoon was bivouaced midway up a mountain called Takur Ghar, in the early stages of Operation Anaconda. It was early March, which meant they were lucky—no snow, just horrendous frosts every morning.

But the biting cold air had some aesthetic advantages. John tipped his head back and took in the majesty of the Milky Way, a highway in the sky spread out above them in a wide-splayed arc. It was a spectacle, even he had to admit.

Some people enjoyed those moments of cosmic inferiority. Lord knew enough people wrote books about it. But John had never enjoyed those stories, not on that level. He knew just how unimportant he was, didn’t need the Grand Canyon or glittering astrological filaments to put him in his place. He’d read explorer stories when he was a child—what little boy hadn’t?—but he’d devoured them for their human triumphs.

But, staring upward, he thought: _Jessie would love this._

And so he loved it, too. Not because it impressed him all that much, but because of what it made him feel. How it nudged that small, secret fondness he carried for people who were capable of relinquishing all but the present moment. People capable of letting go.

###

He woke again as a shadow passed over him. A woman’s body silhouetted from behind, a glimpse of blonde hair in the blue-cast light. His heart went _Jessica?_ But his mind wasn’t that far gone.

She pushed her limp bangs out of her face, regarding him with a somber, hard-bitten expression. He knew her face, but couldn’t immediately place it.

“Good morning,” she said. “Well, evening. Been wondering when you’d come around.”

More in control of his faculties with each passing second, John was able to turn his head side to side, assess things. He imagined he’d wake up in a hospital bed. That was nothing new. But environmental cues had yet to suggest whether this hospital was friendly. His mouth was dry as cotton, tongue thick, throat choked. Anesthesia hangovers were worse than the other kind.

“I’ll get you some water. Try not to move around too much. You’re beat to hell.”

 _Kelly Princeton,_ he finally recalled. Pathologist who’d fabricated death certificates for some Jersey mob offshoot.

That meant friendly. That meant Harold.

When she returned, he contorted his mouth into something he thought was a smile. She held a cup to his lips, complete with a little bendy straw. Now was not the time for feeling aggrieved on behalf of lost independence; he drank and didn’t give a shit.

“Thank you,” he said when he was confident he could speak.

“Returning a favor,” she said.

 _Is Harold here?_ he wanted to ask. But that seemed like the wrong question. That was why he hated sedatives. The effect they had on the mind, that strange mental tunnel vision, it was the only time the right questions didn’t come with charming ease. Even when he was nearing black-out drunk, the parts of his brain that operated on a question and answer basis functioned as intended. They just got a little more morbid, was all.

“Doctor Enright sends her regards,” Princeton said, leaning on a small stool beside John’s bed. “She spent a lot of hours on that shrapnel garage sale you’ve got going on inside you.”

The laugh that eked out of him was dry and wheezy, like a flutter of moths in his throat.

“We’re going to need you to stay put a while longer,” she said. “You took a handgun to the abdomen at point-blank range. Missed all the bits that would have killed you in minutes, but there isn’t exactly a safe way to get gutshot.”

There was a sort of grim honesty in the way pathologists spoke about human bodies. John preferred it to doctors who dealt primarily with living patients. People like he and Kelly Princeton shared a secret language of the dead. The living found it off-putting.

He took more water, tongued at the inside of his mouth. His jaw ached. When his tongue slid along his teeth, the feel of it jerked an awkward memory to the fore of his mind:

_I wouldn’t let Fahey pull your teeth out._

“Something wrong?” Princeton regarded him with an air more clinical than comforting.

“No.”

A part of him felt like he’d never emerged from his dissociation countdown. As if he were still hovering above himself, just a fraction of an inch outside his own skin. Though it took dizzying effort, he balled his left hand into a fist, clenched and unclenched it slowly. He watched his fingers uncurl like they belonged to a stranger.

“You sure don’t ask a lot of questions,” Princeton said, an idle comment that hinted at a greater curiosity she didn’t speak.

John eased his eyes shut in a slow blink, peered up at her with renewed focus.

“What questions should I be asking?”

She hauled her shoulders up, a shrug that accentuated the hard and birdlike lines of tendon in her neck.

“Most people want to know what happened. How they got here. What’s wrong with them. How long until they’re up and about again. If they’re going to live.”

He let his head fall back against the pillow.

“Doctor, am I going to live?” he said with the feigned emotion of someone who cared.

“Yeah,” she said. “You will.”

The rest was irrelevant.

She changed his IV bag, left another cup of water at his bedside, and wandered off. The door let out a soft hiss behind her. Sitting in the cool-toned darkness of the clinic backroom, John explored the newfound relief he felt. He stepped into it like it was water, rolled it around on his tongue like an unexpected flavor. Perhaps that lingering out-of-body sensation stemmed from just how foreign the feeling was.

He no longer wanted to die.

 


End file.
